


get it right this time

by lovemutt



Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: ?? - Freeform, Blood and Violence, Character Death, Gen, Gun Violence, Marauders, Near Death Experiences, Raptidons - Freeform, Sort Of, Tactical Time Dilation, Temporary Character Death, The Captain Can Time Jump To Fix Things, Time Travel, friendships, tender hand holding while dying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:55:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24232429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovemutt/pseuds/lovemutt
Summary: Captain Bobbles of the Unreliable (Sometimes known as Alex Hawthorne) had a curious relationship with time after being frozen and left adrift for so long. She was astoundingly quick to adapt to her new ability to seemingly slow time down with her Tactical Time Dilation, using it to scope out enemies and make stories she told to Phineas a little more action packed, but there was another curious thing she learned she could do with time...
Relationships: She's a lesbian., The Captain & Felix Millstone, The Captain & Parvati Holcomb, both tags platonic those are her freinds
Kudos: 21





	get it right this time

**Author's Note:**

> AKA, I wanted to write Outer Worlds fanfic but didn't have any other ideas except time shenanigans!

Terra-2 was, by far, the nicest place to visit in the Halycon colony. There were so few murders to be solved, so little democratic business to be firmly beaten into a corner, and way fewer monsters to kill with Pavarti’s hammer, and Bobble’s gun that she swung like a tossball bat (and Felix’s overuse of grenades, also sometimes Ellie’s-- you get it). Bobbles, the accidental captain of the Unreliable and, for now, unofficially the one and only Alex Hawthorne, was very pleased every time she got to take a trip to Terra-2 and just… enjoy the visit. No guns out every second, paranoid of a Mantiqueen rounding the corner, or marauders siccing trained rapts on them…

Well, actually, notice how “way fewer monsters” was the exact wording. There were still plenty of battles to fight, and Bobbles was the first to admit that maybe, just maybe, she got a little too cocky and kept her gun holstered a little too long. Maybe, and no one better repeat this, she made a real big mistake and forgot that she had some mild deafness in her left ear after one too many concussions, and some mildly impaired vision, and yeah, maybe she walked right up to the raptidon without thinking because she, for the life of her, couldn’t stop equating it to a puppy. Sue her.

She heard Pavarti all but squeal, snatching up the Captain as gently as she could and pulling her back as the Raptidon started to charge, Felix already rushing past the two of them as Pavarti tried to draw her gun as well. It took Bobbles… a long moment to realize what was happening. She had been through hell and back, and the time dia-whatever was bad enough, but she got knocked around so, so much that not only was the captain not on top of her game (not that being a janitor was really the top of anyone else’s game), but she wasn’t even at the bottom-- She’d started digging at this point.

Bobbles came to moments later, dragging her gun from her back as quickly as she could as she lunged for a stack of crates, popping up to take aim at the raptidon only to find a few marauders coming out from surrounding buildings, firing on her and her friends. Bobbles froze, and without thinking about it, everything else did too.

This was… the most unnerving side effect of the cryo. She was frozen for so long, time just… worked weird for her sometimes. Usually it was when she panicked, when something serious was about to happen and she needed just that extra second to take a breath and look around. Bobbles turned her gaze from side to side, peeking up from over the boxes to see another rapt running down the road, growling the whole way with a marauder just behind it. Taking a quick count, tapping the side of her gun as she swivled her head from side to side to look around, tapping on her gun as the blur of what she knew should be fast movement was brought to a near standstill, Bobbles counted five marauders and two raptidons, including the one she...tried to pet.

She went to take just a step to the right, and felt a wave of nausea hit her, head growing light and eyes crossing right before time returned to normal and left her just a moment unprepared-- She made up for it quickly, continuing her movement and taking aim at the raptidon approaching from the side, holding the trigger until a high-pitched whirring noise was heard and a bright burst of red light exploded from the end of her gun and sent the raptidon tumbling back, disintegrating moments later as it was eaten up.

Pavarti had moved to a sprint, running for the raptidon that Bobbles walked into moments before as Felix moved his grenade launcher from its position on his hip, taking aim at the marauders that ran towards them. Bobbles leaned over the crates, aiming past Pavarti at the raptidon until her attention was caught by the explosions from Felix’s grenades. She instead turned to see if he had gotten anyone, seeing the marauder that was running up in a worse state and instead taking aim for him as Pavarti slammed her hammer down on the raptidon in front of her.

A bullet collided with her chest plate, and Bobbles looked ahead to see a gun barrel sticking out from behind a pile of crates. The captain took another step from behind the cover she had found, no nausea stopping her now, and then one forward as they shot again, getting her in the shoulder. The bullet once more collided and crumpled against her armor (She robbed it from a Rizzo’s factory, if you were wondering), but as she was about to shout a cool one-liner in her approach, a raptidon collided with her from the side.

It had ran past Pavarti, intent on fighting the captain, and tried to tackle her as it jumped through the air. It knocked her off course, definitely, and Bobbles staggered back, raising her gun to take aim at the creature as it snapped at her, catching her leg in it’s jaws and pulling at the armor. She slammed the stock of her gun into the raptidon, smacking it in the top of the head a few times before it released her, knocking her on the ground and leaving her to shoot at it from a much more compromised position. Her first two shots missed in her relative panic, but thankfully her faithful companion was always there to save her hide.

Pavarti rushed in, slamming into the raptidon with her pulse hammer, sending the creature spiraling away from them and into a nearby porch fence. Bobbles pulled herself off the ground, giving a nod of gratitude as she raised her gun to take aim at the marauder still approaching them from the street and...

Bobbles took a deep breath in, feeling a sharp sting under her armor, cool Terra-2 air spilling in when it shouldn’t be allowed to. A lucky shot, she’d give them that much, her armor wasn’t in it’s best condition after a mantiqueen took a layer of metal off the front, lacing under her ribs, and they saw that. The marauder behind the crates disappeared from sight as Bobbles stared into the distance at them.

The captain hit the ground quicker than she could take a breath, knees slamming into the dirt as she frantically brought her hands up to clutch at the wound right between her ribs, blood pooling from the wound. She forced herself forward, throwing herself into the crates in an attempt to lay down, trying to grasp for her inhaler in a desperate attempt to do… something, as if getting some Adreno in her was going to dig a bullet from her ribs and stitch her up nice and neat.

Pavarti was the first to notice, watching the captain get hit and turning to take out the marauder that brought her down, shooting as soon as their head poked over the crates and nailing the shot in one go. No doubt the engineer thought that it was just a minor wound at first, maybe a nasty bruise, after all she had ‘the good armor’, but… Bobbles wished she could have stopped it, the realization that hit Pavarti as she saw blood pouring down the captain's armor, from between metal fingers as Bobbles leaned her sweaty forehead against the crates, wheezing out in pain.

“Cap...Captain? Captain! Oh-Oh my gosh, I--!” Pavarti stammered out, at first moving to help the woman but quickly remembering they were in a fight and instead turning back towards the two remaining marauders, aiming at them as she tried to shout over the gunfire, “Felix! The captain’s hit!”

Felix whirled his head around as he fired off another round, aiming for the door frame of a condemned building in an attempt to get one of the grenades wedged in to blow the bastard inside to the _outside_ , but his fire was cut short as he saw Bobbles kneeling, then saw the blood that pooled under her. “Boss?!” He called out, more of a question than anything, and when Bobbles didn’t reply she suspected he started to worry.

It was sweet, their concern, but she needed them to pay attention to themselves right now, not her. Not her. She wasn’t going to survive this. _Oh god, she wasn’t going to survive this._ The realization hurt, maybe more than the bullet sunk in her chest, and Bobbles felt a crushing feeling of dread hit her, settling in on her shoulders as she replayed that thought over and over again. S _he was going to die._

Her legs could no longer support her, even with the minimal strain they were under, and Bobbles tried to no avail to catch herself as she fell to the side, fingers digging into her wound in fear as she hit the ground with a huff and a sharp, aching pain that had enveloped her entire body now. She took one aching wheeze, lungs struggling to fill with even the slightest bit of air anymore, and Bobbles choked, the taste of copper overcoming her senses and then the distinct feeling of drowning. A sting in her lungs, her throat aching, nose burning as she gasped and tried to grab at something, anything, even just a hand to hold, and found nothing and no one.

She heard it again, Felix’s cry for her to at least acknowledge him, though this time it held fear rather than curiosity. Pavarti had moved forward, no doubt trying to end this fight so she could help the captain, but it was too late. Felix dropped his gun, running towards Bobbles and coming to a sloppy stop just next to her, covered partially by the crates as he fell to his knees and looked down at her. Bobbles didn’t think, she just reached for his arm, clutching it as she tried and tried and tried to just get a breath in, vision darkening with every attempt. Felix’s hands were shaking as he moved to take the captain’s own bloodied hand, fingers prying it from his arm and cupping it between both his palms as he hunched over her.

This hurt so, _so_ much. Bobbles didn’t think she’d die this way, either, if you’d asked her when she was younger she would have said a horrible accident involving chemicals, not shot in the chest by a filthy marauder. Felix was terrified as he looked down at her, and she could tell, every inch of his face was twisted and contorted into a look of horror as he watched his friend bleed out very, _very_ slowly, and just as Bobbles was trying, desperately, to think of funny last words to say, she had no more time. Her body could not continue on like this, gasping for air that wouldn’t come, and her vision darkened completely, leaving her with nothing but this horrible, spreading pain that consumed her every thought, and even then that faded moments later.

But, you see, this wasn’t the first time Bobbles “Alex Hawthorne” Last Name had died. It wasn’t even the second, or third, but the fourth time! Can you believe that? Four times? I know, I know, ‘but how is she alive?’ It’s a good question, and the answer is simple: _She has no fucking clue._

She assumed that, just like with her ability to see things as if they were happening by the very millisecond, her innate ability to… pop back up, if you will, came from her time spent frozen and asleep on a floating spaceship. Time just happened differently for Bobbles, and sometimes the time that happened was… bloody, and painful, and she felt her bones snap under her as she stupidly tried to make a jump that wasn’t makeable (No she didn't want to talk about it). She couldn’t control it, it was a very gentle transition, no abrupt starts, just a sudden end to the unbearable pain and then...

Gentle breeze from Terra-2 blew across her skin. They were within sight of the town she had blindly walked into before, staring down at it from the hill, and as Pavarti prattled on about Junlei, Bobbles stopped dead in her tracks, staring down at the red-colored figure in the field below.

“Captain? Is there something wrong?”

“ _Six_ marauders down there, two rapts, see ‘em?” Bobbles questioned, looking towards the engineer.

Pavarti gave a few nods as she squinted into the distance, “Oh, yeah. We would’ve walked right into them, huh?”

“We can take ‘em.” Felix said with an unearned confidence, grinning at the captain until he saw the serious look on her face. “What? You don’t think we can?”

“We can.” Bobbles assured him, “ _But_ , why don’t we head back instead? Edgewater could use a helping hand with the rebuilding, anyway.”

Felix gave her a quizzical look, but followed up with a quiet nod, “Yeah, alright boss, as long as you don’t mind me telling SAM to come help instead while I go to the ship.”

Bobbles wrapped her arm around Felix’s shoulders as she turned, leading him away from the destroyed and abandoned town ahead of them, “That’s just fine, Feels. I don’t mind a bit.”


End file.
